Disclaimer: I do not own Descendants.
They thought, at first, that Mal was just sick. She had been sniffling for days as a result of the head cold she had been fighting. They thought it had gotten to her and depleted her reserves to the point that her magic had gone dormant in an attempt at energy conservation. It seemed like a reasonable explanation. They had seen enough to know that being tired made it harder for her to do magic. The sort of sputtering out of Mal's attempts at spells that they original noticed felt like they matched that pattern. She would get over the cold and everything would go back to normal was their conclusion.
What did any of them know? They grew up on an Isle where magic was not useable and it was not as though anyone had provided Mal with a handbook upon her arrival complete with an annotated guide to the repercussions on magical tendencies in the face of common illnesses.
They should, perhaps, have asked Fairy Godmother earlier for a little bit of direction, but as Jane reminded them fairly often, her mother was a Fairy. Mal was part Fae. They were not the same thing.
They were concerned, but they were always concerned when one of their number got sick. It was an unfamiliar state of being for them - the barrier on the Isle prevented the transmission of all living things - and viruses and bacteria came under that heading. It was just one more thing to which they had needed to adjust when they made the move to outside the barrier.
It was, after all, Jane had rather shame facedly explained to them once why they were able to eat out of the garbage barges without getting food poisoning for so many years. That had been an awful learning curve for all of them about out of date food items that they had not realized would have such consequences (and it had been so hard to learn to resist smuggling things out of the cafeteria that would only go bad when hidden around their rooms).
Adult "help" had first entered the picture when Mal had missed enough class to draw attention. The school nurse advised rest and drinks with vitamin C, and so they let Mal sleep (obtaining actual permission for her to skip class - what a novel concept for them) and plying her with orange juice (okayed to be removed from the cafeteria) whenever she happened to be awake - which seemed to be less and less often over the course of the next two days.
It was not until a panicked Ben showed up in their room in the middle of the night that Evie realized that there was something else going on - she had never seen the boy king look so rattled.
"I . . . Mal . . . I . . . ," he stuttered and restarted three times before he finally burst out. "Please tell me she is awake?"
Assuming that she in this instance must mean Mal (correctly as it generally was when Ben was speaking), she told him that she was not and reminded him that she was supposed to be resting and Evie had been sleeping before his (after curfew interruption) herself.
He looked sheepish and apologized before getting that look on his face that Mal insisted meant he had just had something occur to him that should have already been obvious. He darted off into the dark of the hallway leaving Evie shaking her head after him and wondering if it was even worth it to try to go back to sleep when her alarm would be ringing in an hour and a half. She decided that it was - the standards of beauty sleep must be upheld after all.
She shared the information with the boys the next morning but they were as clueless as she was - Ben was nowhere to be seen.
Evie came (orange juice in tow) back to their room during her lunch hour only to find Fairy Godmother there tutting over Mal's sleeping figure and muttering something about Moor Fae and promise keeping.
"Is something wrong?" Evie asked as soon as she got over the shock. Fairy Godmother had made it well known that their rooms were their private space and she would only intrude if the occasion were truly serious.
"I'm afraid that . . .," the woman started before seeming to change her mind about the direction of her words. "There are privacy rules, Evie. I know that is not what you want to hear when you are worried about someone, but I can't change those rules. You can find a copy of those restrictions in the library should you be interested. It's in the law section. There are lots of interesting things in the law section. Newer regulations pertaining to the founding of Auradon and more historical items of interest as well - even some treatises on the order and methodology of the nonhuman species from before Auradon even existed. You never know when such knowledge might prove illuminating."
If Evie hadn't been so worried, then she would have needed to suppress some laughter over the intent expression on the face of the headmistress of her school - she was doing everything short of winking at her. The hoops that those in Auradon jumped through to try to loophole their way around things instead of just out and out breaking the rules were astounding. Why did they always have to make things so complicated?
As it was, she did not have the time to think through all of that. There was something wrong with Mal and instead of just telling her what it was she was being giving hints and clues to follow. If Fairy Godmother had invaded their dorm room to hover over Mal, then it was something serious. She didn't have time for anything other than rounding up the rest of her friends and putting them to work. They had an entire subsection of the library to search apparently.
